The widespread use and growth of search services on the Internet and other networks has led to a desire for increasing quality and accuracy in search services and results. A number of search engines or services hosted on the public Internet, as for example illustrated in FIG. 1, allow users to enter search terms of interest to receive a set of search results in order of estimated relevance, so that the user may click a link or otherwise select Web sites or other hits of interest. Some search services likewise attempt to provide an enhanced search experience by way of search extensions or corrections, for instance to a suggested alternate search term with verbiage such as “did you mean” when the user has made a typographical error, along with the updated term with correct spelling.
However, in some search activity a user may have the intention of locating Web pages, files or other media or results which share or are based on common attributes or characteristics, as well as containing information related to their inputted search terms. For instance, a user may enter a set of search terms such as “car dealers Seattle WA” in hopes of finding a set of retail automobile outlets in their local area. Existing search engines may be able to return some grouping of car dealers in some geographic region. However, the user may, for instance, wish to only view those retail car Web sites which contain digital photographs of automobile models in stock, for instance in JPG (joint photographic experts group) or other format. Or the user may wish to locate a local or other restaurant whose menu may be encoded on a Web page, for instance in Adobe PDF™ or other format.
However, even those search services which attempt to offer a user spell-corrected or other search corrections offer no facility for identifying search results within certain categories of attributes or types, for instance to extend a search to all Web sites or other sources which contain the relevant search terms along with a PDF file, an image file, which contain those terms in a title, or other characteristics, attributes, features or other metadata or information which may characterize a relevant subset of the user's results. Other problems in search technology exist.